The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (22 page)

I'd barely seen Matt since the day we talked about the bloodstain. He'd been skipping school a lot, and on those days when I did glimpse him in the hall, I hid behind my locker door or ducked into the bathroom. With the changing weather, he'd taken to wearing a plaid flannel shirt with his fatigues. He hung out on the smoker's patio in the mornings and afternoons. I called his house every night from Holly's banana phone and never said anything. Sometimes Matt hung up right away, others he'd lay the receiver beside a radio he'd tuned to a Tejano station, or he'd read classified ads from
Soldier of Fortune
into the phone:
The survival knife you've been waiting for, ten-inch blade and hollow compass-topped handle. Bounty hunting is legal and profitable! Silent firepower: crossbows and slingshots.
The duffel bag with all of my warfare stuff was still in my room, and though I no longer expected Matt to take it away, I also hadn't unpacked it.

So on the morning when he waved me over to the smoker's patio and said he'd pick up the duffel that afternoon, I should have been relieved. There were a few other students on the patio, sallow-skinned seniors I'd seen with Holly, and who'd always intimidated me. I was surprised by how easily Matt fit in, saddened by it. He was wearing his tiger-stripe camos, toeing out a cigarette with his combat boot. He blew smoke over his shoulder, the way my mother sometimes did, and said, "Is that cool? Jeff said he'd give me a ride."

"I threw it away," I said.

"No way," he said, his voice light with disappointment, as if I'd forgotten his birthday.

"I didn't think you were coming. I was tired of seeing it."

"That really sucks, Josh."

"And there wasn't a bloodstain," I said.

"What?"

"At Holly's house," I said. "Sam didn't shoot himself."

"That's what this is about?"

"I looked. There's no bloodstain," I said. "He burned himself with a pot of water. He'll probably have a skin graft."

Matt nodded, his eyes downcast and thoughtful. A small wind picked up, wafting the acrid smell of put-out cigarettes. I thought Matt was thinking of something kind to say about Sam. Once, when I got stung by an asp behind his house, he broke off a piece of aloe from his mother's plant and rubbed it on the wound.

Now, though, he just grinned and said, "I bet his face looks like melted cheese, all stretched and gooey. He won't need a mask for Hallowe—"

My fist connected right above Matt's temple. "Oh shit," a girl said, and a crowd of smokers cinched around us. Before Matt knew what was happening—before
I
knew what was happening—I'd hit him again, on his mouth. Already there was blood on his teeth, in the corners of his lips. Then I was on top of him and we were falling to the patio and he was trying to cover his face with his forearms and saying, "Dude, come on, please no," and I was waiting for someone to stop me, to pull me off him, to save both of us.

The principal called my mother at the dry cleaners to pick me up from school; he'd suspended me for three days. I expected her to be angry or embarrassed, but when I apologized to her, she said, "Oh, Joshie, we always thought Matt was a twerp."

We drove to the bayfront and sat on the seawall. Although we were out in the open—the bay seething in front of us, the docked sailboats bobbing in the marina to the west—I felt as if we were hiding, staking out a place to plot our next move. The tide heaved. Waves walloped the barnacled pylons; the dirty foam spread and dissolved. Eventually a crisp, salted wind nosed ashore and my mother scooted closer to me. I kept expecting her to light a cigarette.

"Sometimes I snoop in the Hensley house," I said.

"I know."

"You do?"

"I watch your little flashlight beam from our window," she said. "It reminds me of a fly trying to get out."

"I don't take anything," I said. "I just look."

"I know that too."

A white gull hovered over us, then banked off and wheeled over the surf. I could hear cables clanging against hollow masts in the marina, the wind soughing through the dry palm trees that loomed along the seawall. Behind us stood the Bayfront Auditorium, where the gun expos took place. My knuckles ached.

"Dad says Sam might look different when he comes home," I said.

My mother nodded. She was watching the gull. It had landed on a pylon, its head moving around in twitches.

"And he said I should stay away from Holly."

"Her life's already sewn up," she said, her gaze still trained on the gull. "Matt's is too. And now probably Sam's."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Good," my mother said, resting her head on my shoulder. "Good, I'm glad."

Now I think of 1986 as the year my life pivoted away from what it had been, maybe the year when all of our lives pivoted. It was the year my parents spoke in low, furtive tones and I strained to hear what they weren't saying. It was the year I surrendered the weapons of my youth—the morning after I fought Matt, I
did
throw out my duffel bag—and the year Holly Hensley shocked everyone by dropping out of school and joining the coast guard. This happened right after Thanksgiving. Her enlisting, I remember, was met with disillusionment and disdain—it seemed selfish and rash—but she found her footing in the military and enjoyed a distinguished career. After the coast guard, she moved to the army and was stationed in Hawaii, Guam, and, until her chopper went down two days ago, Afghanistan. According to the short obituary my mother just e-mailed me, Holly is survived by two sons and a husband, and she achieved the rank of staff sergeant. I hadn't seen her in almost twenty years. Funeral arrangements are being made in Corpus. I'll send flowers, and if I can find it, I'll make a copy of the orange-grove photo and mail it to her family.

The night after I got suspended, I decided to steal that picture of Holly and her brother. I'd been lying on my bed earlier that day—my father had taken away my stereo and television privileges, and until my suspension ended, I was only allowed out of the house to feed Roscoe—and I'd thought having the orange-grove photo might quell my desire to sneak into Holly's room. I'd also started thinking Mr. Hensley would return soon, so my access to the house felt fleeting, like a journey to a foreign country—a deployment—was coming to an end. I wanted a souvenir.

The moon was full that night, lamping the Hensleys' backyard and rimming the curtains in Holly's room. Everything else lay in deep shadow; I clicked my flashlight on and off to see, and wondered if my mother was watching from across the street. I suspected she was and didn't mind. The house still smelled of potpourri, a little dank. I'd debated over grabbing another picture from Holly's parents' room to replace the one I wanted to take, but finally decided I'd just cluster the remaining three photos and hope Holly would have forgotten what had been there before. It seemed possible.

I was standing in front of her dresser, trying to visualize the most inconspicuous way to rearrange the pictures, when from behind me I heard, "What's buzzin', cousin?"

I spun around, knocked into the dresser. The frames toppled. My heart kicked in my chest. Holly was on her bed, lying on her side among the stuffed animals. Even when I looked straight at her, her image was obscured in the dark.

"I didn't take anything," I said.

"You should have," she said. "I would."

"I just like the picture of you and Sam in the orange grove."

"I do too," she said. "What you can't see is that the oranges are frozen solid. It was last year, right before we came back, and there was this massive cold snap that killed everything."

I clasped my hands behind my back; they were trembling again. I said, "I'm sorry for sneak—"

"We're alone here, if you're wondering," she said, shifting on the bed. "My parents are still in Houston with Sam. Julio came to get me. If I don't go back to school, I won't graduate."

"I'm suspended," I said.

"And Matt's a bloody mess."

"You heard?"

"I heard you were defending Sam," she said. "I almost went to your house to thank you, but then I saw the grass clippings on the carpet and figured you'd be back."

"I never looked in your drawers," I said.

"You'll do better next time," she said.

A raft of clouds floated past the moon, shrouding the room for a moment. I looked at the ceiling and couldn't see it. I could hear myself breathing.

"I wanted the orange-grove picture," I said. "I was going to steal it."

"You can't have that one, but I'll make you a copy," she said. "Want anything else?"

"I want Sam to get better."

"Me too. He's trying. Anything else?"

"I want to know about Mr. Mitchell," I said.

Holly rolled onto her back. She tossed a stuffed white bear into the air, caught it, then did it again. She said, "I'll tell you, but you only get three wishes. You're sure this is how you want to use your last one?"

I wasn't sure of anything at that moment. I felt as if I were balancing on a precipice, and I needed to think clearly. I tried to imagine how disappointed my father would be if he knew where I was, tried to understand what my mother had meant about everyone's lives being sewn up. I thought of how Sam used Holly's sweatshirt for a blanket, and the baseball cap she'd given him for his birthday. I wondered how it would feel to live outside Texas, what it would be like to walk through a frozen orange grove or to douse yourself with boiling water or to see your young son lying in a coma and not recognize him.

And then, like that, I understood. Before I could stop myself, I said, "He's yours, isn't he? Sam is."

Holly tossed the bear again, higher. In the air, it spiraled and looked like a silver fish flashing through murky water. She did it again, higher still. I thought she was trying to hit the ceiling I could barely see.

"That's why you went to Florida," I said. "Your parents didn't want—"

"Josh," she said.

"Yes?"

"Stop talking," she said.

"I won't tell anyone."

"Come here," Holly said. "Just come here."

I thought I would lie beside her and she would whisper the trajectory of Sam's life to me, explain who else knew her secrets and who his father was. It gave me a sensation of inertia, of countless mysteries parting around me like currents. But Holly offered none of this. She just lifted the comforter and I took off my shoes and she pulled me on top of her. We kicked her stuffed animals to the carpet, stripped off our clothes, tangled into each other. Roscoe barked in the backyard and ran along the fence; Holly said, "He chases possums." The house groaned. I shivered. I thought of the Luger in her parents' bedroom and wondered where Matt was at that late hour. I worried my father would come looking for me, but also felt certain my mother would run interference. Soon Holly said, "I just want him to be okay," and started sobbing against my chest. I was fourteen years old, scared and inexperienced and mystified by the luck of my life, and though I could think of nothing to say, I held her close, as tight as I could. Eventually her breathing slowed so completely I wondered if she'd gone to sleep. I hoped so. I was wide awake, my eyes open and adjusted to the darkness. The edges of her curtains were again framed in moonlight, and in the shallow glow, our skin looked new and smooth and unblemished, ready for the scars that were lying, somewhere, in ambush.

FROM
The New Yorker

E
ARLY ON A SUNDAY
, after first mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford toward the coast, where my mother's people came from. It is a hot August day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh, where my father lost our red shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew, where the man who won her sold her not long afterward. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake the plaits out of my hair and lie flat on the back seat, looking up through the rear window. I wonder what it will be like, this place belonging to the Kinsellas. I see a tall woman standing over me, making me drink milk still hot from the cow. I see another, less likely version of her, in an apron, pouring pancake batter into a frying pan, asking would I like another, the way my mother sometimes does when she is in good humor. The man will be her size. He will take me to town on the tractor and buy me red lemonade and crisps. Or he'll make me clean out sheds and pick stones and pull ragweed and docks out of the fields. I wonder if they live in an old farmhouse or a new bungalow, whether they will have an outhouse or an indoor bathroom with a toilet and running water.

An age, it seems, passes before the car slows and turns into a tarred, narrow lane, then slams over the metal bars of a cattle grid. On either side, thick hedges are trimmed square. At the end of the lane, there's a white house with trees whose limbs are trailing the ground.

"Da," I say. "The trees."

"What about them?"

"They're sick," I say.

"They're weeping willows," he says, and clears his throat.

On the housefront, tall, shiny windowpanes reflect our coming. I see myself looking out from the back seat, wild as a tinker's child, with my hair all undone, but my father, at the wheel, looks just like my father. A big, loose hound lets out a few rough, halfhearted barks, then sits on the step and looks back at the doorway, where the man has come out to stand. He has a square body like the men my sisters sometimes draw, but his eyebrows are white, to match his hair. He looks nothing like my mother's people, who are all tall, with long arms, and I wonder if we have not come to the wrong house.

"Dan," he says, and tightens himself. "What way are you?"

"John," Da says.

They stand looking out over the yard for a moment and then they are talking rain: how little rain there is, how the priest in Kil-muckridge prayed for rain this very morning, how a summer like this was never before known. There is a pause, during which my father spits, and then the conversation turns to the price of cattle, the EEC, butter mountains, the cost of lime and sheep dip. I am used to it, this way men have of not talking: they like to kick a divot out of the grass with a boot heel, to slap the roof of a car before it takes off, to sit with their legs wide apart, as though they do not care.